Despite being set largely in and around a nightclub, Juan Bustillo Oro’s La huella de unos labios (US: The Trace of Lips) is that rare Mexican noir featuring no lavish musical numbers, and indeed barely any musical score at all (even “FIN” on the last frame appears in silence). Instead, Oro adapts Cornell Woolrich’s short story as a simple, suspenseful tale of a woman caught between her feelings of love and revenge, narrating each step of her plan (we hear more of her interior monologue than we do her spoken lines) as she plays detective, spy, and criminal to varying degrees. Story-wise, cigarette girl María (a very appealing Rosario Granados) is engaged to the love of her life, Felipe (Rubén Rojo), but is forced to parry with the sexual advances of her employer, sleazy gangster and nightclub owner César Villa (Carlos López Moctezuma). After an impatient Villa has Felipe killed, María wants revenge, so she degrades herself by marrying Villa so she can plant evidence that will destroy him (this will include applying lipstick to a fresh corpse). Luis Beristáin plays police detective Manuel Andrade who, during the course of his own investigation of Felipe’s death, falls for María and becomes her protector. While the film’s pacing has stretches of unevenness and the climax may come too suddenly for some, Oro creates moments of satisfying suspense (Villa’s footsteps walking upstairs as María waits in the bedroom, the unexpected arrival of Cortés as María alters the crime scene), and Granados brings appealing complexity to a role defined as much by thought as action.